Since the advent of the Internet, many retail stores offer the option to purchase items “online” through a retail store website. With the presence of an Internet connection, consumers can direct a web browser to a retail store website by entering a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) in the address bar of the web browser. The displayed retail store website allows consumers to see the items that are available from that store, almost as if the consumer was physically in the store looking at the products that are available on the shelves. The store website may organize the items that are available from the store into different sections, categories, or departments to help facilitate the consumer navigating through the store website. Furthermore, the store website may advertise any specials that are currently occurring in an effort to entice the consumer to purchase items that are on sale.
As the consumer navigates through the website and selects a particular product, the website may display additional details about the product. For example, the website may display the retail price of the item and any discounts or sale prices that may be available. Information may be displayed about the product specifications, user reviews of the product, and an option to compare selected products to each other.
Finally, if the consumer decides to purchase a particular item, the website provides an option to add the item to a purchase queue, commonly labeled as “cart.” The cart simulates a shopping cart and allows the consumer to accumulate items from the website until they are ready to execute a transaction, pay for the products that have been added to their cart, and provide billing and shipping details.
A common difficulty for online consumers is navigating to the correct location to find the products that they are interested in researching or purchasing; especially if the product is unique or needs to be from a specific manufacturer. As more and more products become readily available for purchase, this task becomes increasingly difficult to filter out the product of interest from the innumerable other products that are available for purchase.
In order to help facilitate the online shopping experience for a customer, retail stores provide search features on their websites. The search feature allows a consumer to execute queries on product names and/or merchandise categories. Queries enable the consumer to find the products that they are interested in purchasing and/or researching in a more convenient and timely fashion. In response to a query on a particular search term, a website can return the products that most closely resemble the search terms entered by the consumer. The products are often returned in the form of a list.
Given the many products that are available for purchase over the Internet, it becomes incumbent for a retail store to optimize their search feature such that a consumer can find items of interest in a timely and efficient manner. If a retail store's search feature is not optimized, and returns results that are not of interest to the consumer, the consumer may decide to give up and not make the purchase they had intended, or to visit a different store's website. These actions can result in a loss of business to the retail store, and may serve as a deterrent, causing the consumer to not visit the website again in the future.
In order to improve the search feature's search results, many retail stores incorporate human input in addition to the search algorithms that are already present. The human input is used to modify a product's fields so that more relevant items are returned when a query is executed. However, human input requires significant effort, and is error prone.